I was having office hours today with one of the startups I work with, and asked the founder how he was going on sales. He responded by saying that things were slow, as he was preparing thoroughly for the next phase. He quoted Abraham Lincoln: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and…

I was part of a panel today run by InternetNZ on Hate and the Internet. The event was framed as follows: There is increasing discussion about hate speech and the issues associated with the publishing and circulation of hateful content online. But what is hate speech? And what does it mean in a New Zealand…

Just kidding, this post is a review of Kubuntu / Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) I’ve been running Linux on my desktop – either directly, or in a virtual machine (VM) – since Mandrake 8.1 in 2002, and I’ve had a love-hate relationship with it. Love: Free (as in both beer and speech) Open Source, configurability,…

Back in 2006, when I set up thinktank.co.nz’s mail server defenses, SPAM was increasing at an astronomical rate. There were a number of tools to use on mail servers to help stem the tide, including greylisting, SpamAssassin, Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBL’s), signature systems including Vipul’s Razor and Pyzor; other technologies such as Sender Policy Framework…

Do you want to print off articles (either on paper or PDF) from unprintable websites like the NBR? Some web property owners set up their sites so that you can only view them on screen. No problem, it’s completely possible to print these off using this little trick. You’ll need the Chrome browser to do…

Today I’m participating in a meeting called Optimistic Futures, organised by the Service Innovation Lab, InternetNZ, and Victoria University – three organisations with which I have an association. Here is my own broad vision for what I’d like the world to look like in 2070. We have solved the big, wicked problems. The environment is…

Natalia Pritchard recently set up a NZGovTech Meetup to collect ideas from New Zealanders for projects that the D5 countries could work on together. At the meetup, people were invited to pitch their ideas, with the best ones being selected for further development. Along with Natalia and Michael Thornton, I proposed that the D5 set…

I had a nice interview with Simon Morton on Radio NZ this morning, talking about (inter alia) the development of the NZ Startup ecosystem, recycling capital, the Lean methodology, the scientific method, and its application to policy development. Listen to it here, … or jump over to the Radio New Zealand web site.

It must be that time of year again. There seems to be heightened activity of script-driven attacks on servers. Most of these attacks are attempted brute-force password cracks of WordPress accounts. Here’s a list of countries (by ISO country code) that attacks have come on one of my servers from in the last 48 hours….

I was contacted by Radio New Zealand this morning, who asked if I had any thoughts about Lorde’s recent decision to cancel her concert in Tel-Aviv, in support of BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions). This is what I told them. It’s complicated. A lot more complicated than most people can take in or are willing…